not new, but...Alex Ross on Adorno

"Adorno’s subsequent thunderings about Auschwitz have a self-corrective aspect, as if he were making up for years of not quite looking evil in the face. Some skeptical commentators argue that he continued to promote a nationalist musical agenda, excoriating almost all composers who were not German or Austrian. It could be said that Adorno used the Holocaust a little too freely, a little too superciliously, as a way of escalating aesthetic battles that predated Hitler’s rise to power.

In 1949, it worked: "The Philosophy of New Music" wowed the confused young minds who were seeking new certitudes, new laws, new gods. Adorno, together with his comrade-in-arms Boulez, probably succeeded in frightening more than a few composers of the neoclassical type into thinking that their music was not just bad but criminal. It is instructive to look at the names of works that were played at Darmstadt from 1946 on. In the first few years, you see titles such as Sonatine, Suite for Piano, Chamber Symphony, Scherzo, and Concerto in E Flat. After 1949, the year of the "Philosophy," neoclassical titles dwindle and are replaced by phrases fit for a "Star Trek" episode: "Music in Two Dimensions," "Schipot," "Polyphonie X," "Syntaxis," "Anepigraphe." There was a fad for abstractions in the plural: "Perspectives," "Structures," "Quantities," "Configurations," "Interpolations." Audiences enjoyed "Spectogram," "Seismogramme," "Audiogramme," and "Sphenogramme." Emblematic was the career of the minor composer Hermann Heiss, who, back in the Nazi regime, had written a "Fighter Pilot March." At the first Darmstadt gathering, in 1946, he was represented by a Sonata for Flute and Piano. In 1956, sensing which way the wind was blowing, he showed up with "Expression K..."